The Guy Who Knew a Guy

Family Secrets

iHeartPodcasts

Society & Culture

4.5 • 5.2K Ratings

🗓️ 18 December 2025

⏱️ 76 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

When Francesca sets out to understand her father’s past, she is faced with a world of crime, silence, and denial. But it’s not just his past she must reckon with; it’s her present, her inheritance of a story no one wanted to tell.

Francesca Fontana is the author of The Family Snitch.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is an I-Heart podcast.
0:02.6	Guaranteed Human.
0:04.5	Jingle bells, jingle bells, jingle all the way. Yo, yo, yo, yo. Can we get Thanksgiving first? I'm hungry. What's up, y'all? It's Kadeen. And DeVal, the host of the Ellis Ever After podcast. This holiday season, tune out the noise and tune in to Ellis Ever After. On Ellis Ever After, we get real with our crew about family, love and marriage.
0:23.8	And everything else. season. Tune out the noise and tune in to Ellis Ever After. On Ellis Ever After, we get real with our crew about family, love and marriage, and
0:24.0	everything else in between.
0:25.8	Listen to Ellis Ever After on America's number one podcast network, IHeart.
0:29.9	Follow Ellis Ever After and start listening on the free IHeart Radio app today.
0:34.6	Family Secrets is a production of IHeart Radio.
0:38.9	We all go through childhood wondering who our parents are when they're not mom or dad.
0:45.0	That's why some of us eavesdrop sneak into closets and rummage through dresser drawers in secret.
0:51.7	As adults, we have to decide how much to dig and how much to let lie.
0:58.2	That's Francesca Fontana, award-winning reporter for the Wall Street Journal, an author of
1:04.7	The Family Snitch, a daughter's memoir of Truth and Lies.
1:09.9	Francesca's is a story of being lied to and gaslit by someone she loves, her own father.
1:16.8	It's also a story about a young woman's resilience and the ways that her upbringing shaped her.
1:26.4	Music I'm Danny Shapiro, and this is family secrets, the secrets that are kept from us, the secrets we keep from others, and the secrets we keep from ourselves.
1:47.8	Tell us. from others and the secrets we keep from ourselves. Tell me about the landscape of your childhood. Where did you grow up and what are some of your
1:52.4	early memories of just being a little kid? My family's from Chicago, specifically the
1:57.6	southwest side of Chicago. That's where I grew up until I was 10 years old.
2:02.6	My mom was my primary parent, so my early childhood is really all warm because of her, you know,
2:12.2	all of the memories of going to Oak Park and seeing the Frank Lloyd Wright houses and, you know, going to the Field Museum.
2:21.3	All of those memories are very centered around my mother, Mia.
	...

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